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a whiff of whimsy: communal life and leisure at Italy’s serydarth

* Jakarta Globe, 07 October 2009

Call me curious, but the thought of joining a sharing and caring commune intrigues the hell out of the selfish individualistic creature that I am. So I made for Serydarth, an intercultural commune nestled in the church-speckled Italian town of Casale Monferrato.

In truth, it was the free bed and breakfast with a dose of culture that drew me in. The commune’s founder, a young Italian called Cristhian with a row of widely spaced upper teeth and sleepy almond eyes, pitched Serydarth as a place where travelers can stay a week without any obligation except to observe, enjoy and participate in local community events, many of which he organizes.

During their stay, wanderers and the general crowd of restless youngsters looking for a cool place to rest their weary heads connect with each other and tap into their creativity for everything from an impromptu cello composition to painting the garage a new shade of soft pink.

Travelers weave in and out of Serydarth, leaving their mark like colorful pieces of diverse tapestry. Occupying a first floor flat in Casale, the commune is a testimonial to the handiwork of past visitors with its lilac hallway, sky blue bathroom, tangerine door frames and kitchen the color of cornfields.

Alas, I wasn’t the first Indonesian to step into these rooms. A Rp 1,000 bill (10 cents) hung above the bathroom door, a souvenir left by two Indonesian girls who left Serydarth the week before I arrived. I was, however, the first new arrival this month. One of many. A German, a Japanese and a Portuguese traveler soon followed. All on the same day.

Delia, a plump yoga teacher from Berlin, had come to hike the trails of the Italian Renaissance, which surround Casale and the nearby town of Alba. A former Italian teacher, she dreams in Italian and took to bossing people around, giving them unwanted advice about traveling the region.

An aspiring fashion designer, Toyo, is studying aesthetics at Osaka University, but doesn’t want to create anything yet. The only fashionable evidence on him was the fact that the whippet-slim boy had taken to wearing kitchen utensils as head gear, with a chopstick protruding from his ponytail and a three-pronged fork tip as an earring. He was on his way to the Venice Biennale and may well suit the inexplicable modern art shown there. Chico, with frizzy curls and John Lennon glasses, talked incessantly. Mostly he sang Portugal’s praises. It struck me as mildly ironic when he confessed the need to escape his self-confessed slothful country by coming to Italy.

“I realize I need to go out of my country where there is no one to help me, so I can start doing something,” said Chico, a high school dropout who had spent the last four years checking water meters in Lisbon. Then, with flair, he announced he would paint the organ the next day.

Our days were lengthy due to the lack of work. Leisure time abounds at Serydarth and I was left wondering how Cristhian funds the place. For someone used to working regular hours, or any hours at all, so much freedom to do nothing can prove disconcerting.

Waiting in vain for our muses to inspire us to paint the flat and at a loss for what to do, our potpourri of nations took walks, discussed our countries and cooked.

At Serydarth, the creation of meals could only be likened to an impromptu jazz performance. They were fun ensemble experiments. Each individual contributed a dish, improvising with whatever ingredients we could find, often not knowing what the results would be. But when the food was laid on the table, it was a feast for our hungry eyes.

Held in the cozy hand painted living room, mealtimes filled with food and languages provided me with the best entertainment of the day. Conversations ping-ponged across the dining table in a smorgasbord of German, Italian, English and Portuguese. Sometimes, a spattering of Japanese came from Toyo, as he often thought aloud, attempting to translate his words into English. I was left grasping at Latin roots, praying for cognates, attempting to make myself understood in a mixture of French, Spanish and English.

But even though it offered friendship from different cultures and a chance to be communally creative, I wasn’t ready to live in the small pocket of society that is Serydarth, where we were a haphazard congregation of outsiders confronting conventionality by either living or sampling an alternative lifestyle. The days were too empty and the pace slower than a drunken frog’s leap.

Leisure time is still a stranger I’m unaccustomed to and the novelty of communal living wore out as quickly as a pair of run-down socks in the harshest tumble-dryer.

So after less than two days, in the early hours of the morning, I slipped on my knapsack and closed the wooden doors of Serydarth behind me.

a whiff of whimsy: picking up a spatula in Tuscany

*Jakarta Globe, 30 Sept 2009

I stumbled by chance across Asvanara, a horse farm in the heart of Tuscany, Italy’s famed wine region.

Here, where the sky is home to clouds as fat as Gorgonzola cheese-filled gnocchi and the air is crisp as freshly baked French baguettes, I wear the various hats of dishwasher, housemaid and sous chef.

As the farm teaches courses in natural horsemanship it is always filled with boisterous Italian equine aficionados clad in jeans, fringed leather chaps and cowboy hats. The owners have freshly-scrubbed faces, ride bareback, practice yoga and are prone to performing morning meditations in the buff.

Days are filled with everyone’s constant greeting of “ciao!” punctuating the air, the hypnotic swishing of horses’ tails and the hopping of crickets guiding my way through the farm’s grassy terrain.

Lining the slopes of the farm are quaint wooden bungalows, named after planets, set aside for students. Pink popsicle-colored hammocks are slung around the trees outside, complemented by the arresting vista of Tuscany falling sleepily into autumn.

It is in this postcard-perfect place that I have discovered my passion for the kitchen and homemade cuisine.

On the road I’ve experienced my share of kitchens. In fact, I make a habit of gravitating toward them.

In Bujumbura, Burundi, I crouched besides a wooden fire cooking gruel with three African girls in a dimly-lit mud hut. I sipped hot chocolate and shared laughter with three generations of women baking apple pie in a creamy New Jersey home. I peeled potatoes by the bucketful to earn my dinner in the blisteringly hot kitchen of a temperamental cook by the Dordogne river in France.

In any home, I find kitchens are more than just where food is created. They are where friendships are formed. Within those four walls is the sense of something new and, also, a sense of comfort. The kitchen is as warm as a mother’s womb and full of tastes and smells reminiscent of youth.

On my first day at Asvanara, I had a taste of the local grub, a simple meal of creamy cauliflower soup and spaghetti dressed with fresh tomatoes and spices. But the chef’s homemade concoctions with his secret slips and slaps of spices gave me an insatiable appetite. It was love at first bite. You could say, he had me at spatula.

From that moment forward, I knew that being the housemaid wasn’t going to cut it. I volunteered for extra kitchen duty. I wanted to learn how to cook.

For a girl who once charred the ceiling of her apartment because she didn’t know how to work a gas stove and had eggs blow up after attempting to cook them in the microwave, this may not sound like the best idea. During my time in Jakarta, the only time I stepped into a grocery store was to purchase a Magnum ice-cream and the extent of my cooking skills as a bachelorette in London were limited to adding soy sauce to a daily diet of buttered salmon fillet and sauteed spinach.

But I thought I’d chance it this time around. After all, I had a kitchen god in Asvanara in the form of Udo, an Enid-Blyton-reading-yoga-master-vegetarian-chef from Germany. As fate would have it, Udo even has a connection to my homeland. His first kitchen was in an Indonesian restaurant in Berlin and one of the first dishes he learnt was gado-gado (mixed vegetables with peanut sauce).

In order to be in the presence of Udo, my other, not-so-coveted, chores required me to wash dishes and clean the dining areas. From the crack of the fog-filled dawns until the blue high noons, I tackled dishes and the perpetually soiled mess hall floors, courtesy of the cowboys.

The hard work paid off. Gradually, Udo began to trust me to handle food.

I discovered that the kitchen flirts with every sensory faculty.

It sings. Heated butter gurgles, pots and pans argue noisily when washed, ovens hiss and plucked basil sighs. The aroma of chopped parsley, the scent of grated lemon and sprinkled cinnamon wafting through the air, filling the room, teases the nostrils and cavorts with the senses.

And there are tactile sensations attached to the preparation of a meal. To feel the chill of the cucumber’s skin, the juicy seeds tumbling out of a ripe tomato, the slippery heat rising from cooked pasta and the pillow softness of whipped cream are to be in touch with the life source that is food.

Soon I was assigned baking duties. Within a week I knew how to bake bread, creating six baguettes a day for over a dozen hungry cowboys and ranch hands, and learn the secrets of making chocolate from scratch.

But after weeks of pizza and pasta, not even Udo’s culinary talent can prevent them turning bland upon my Spice Islands tongue.  Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a bowl of Indomie noodles right now!

a whiff of whimsy: my days on an Austrian camel farm

*Jakarta Globe, 23 Sept 2009

I smell like camel. Barely 24 hours after I began my first day at a camel farm in the foothills of Austria, I have already bonded with the two-hoofed creatures and constantly carry the pungent odor of the animals’ scent and saliva on my skin.

From the rocky coastline of west Norway, it took three countries, two planes, a cab, four trains, a tram and almost 14 hours to reach the town of Melk by the Danube River, home to the largest Benedictine monastery in Europe and where I was met by Gerda, the owner of the camel farm.

The farm lies in the most idyllic of settings, with an Austrian pine forest as a backdrop and only a stone’s throw away from Vienna. In a compound, a succession of gravelly stone houses painted the color of honey mustard are occupied by Gerda, her mother and the family’s elastics and suspender-belt factory.

The farm is a menagerie consisting of 11 camels, brought by Gerda from places as far flung as Mongolia and Canary Islands, a handful of tall stallions and short Shetlands, a white mule who likes to roll on its back and is stereotypically stubborn, a llama with two-toned ears, a gray ostrich that rushes toward people and fences in bursts, deer who flit in and out of the surrounding forest, a monochrome Shitzu called Killa, a plump orange tabby and a stray black rooster that materializes only during sauerkraut-stacked lunches.

My first day on the farm was spent scooping the poop of excited camels who found themselves the supporting actors in an Austrian children’s television show — “Tom Turbo” — about a talking bicycle. The plot, an actor explained while seeming quite embarrassed about being in the long-running show at all, involved kidnapping the camels. Human cast members wore beige safari suits of cotton and leather while Peter, one of the ruddy-cheeked child actors, carried a phone in the shape of a tennis ball.

Gerda’s farm was to be occupied for the week by the film crew. The dawn wake-up call was greeted by the sight of Tom Turbo, the remote controlled bicycle, nonchalantly riding by the stables while batting his enviably long eyelashes and occasionally speaking bursts of German in a bass voice usually reserved for deities.

Gerda’s camels are as well-trained as they come and despite popular belief, have yet to spit at me. But they do tend to defecate when excited. Though they have appeared in about 10 television and film productions in the past, Gerda said they still get stirred up by cameras and large groups of people. So once “Achtung!” is called and the cameras roll, small brown gumball-like objects tumble from the camels’ backsides every few minutes, making popping noises as they hit the ground.

Of all the camels, my favorite is Halef. The coat that covers his two humps is as thick as freshly shorn grass and a tie-dyed mixture of browns, ranging from sienna to dark chocolate. Knobbly-kneed with a tuft of hair jutting from his nobbly head like a punk rocker, he is the largest and most compliant camel, preferring to sit and languidly take in the scenery.

Aside from the camels, the farm is filled with characters. The other Tom is a volunteer helper from Australia. In the afternoons, he enjoys running around the farm and bathing in the fresh water creek near the paddocks. While deep in muck, he divulges random information, such as how Gerda was once a hippie chased by Interpol and would invite him for midnight dips in the Danube. The lady herself, bespectacled with wispy gray blonde hair, reminds me of the nervous and worried Rabbit from “Alice in Wonderland” as she stomps around the compound in riding boots with a permanently pinched look on her face.

Then there is Genahdi, a strapping Bulgarian with a gray crewcut and fleshy muscles barely contained by his daily uniform of navy singlet and blue dungarees. The stoic one of the lot, he is often seen standing placidly before the camels, holding their reins as he waits for Gerda’s strained and muddled instructions. He speaks no English, so we smile instead and get along like a house on fire.

For an afternoon, the filming relocated to the top of a mountain behind the farm. On horseback, Gerda led the caravan of camels up a riding trail, while Tom, Genahdi and I guided them on foot.

Once we reached the top, I lay near Genahdi on a grassy hillside, holding the camel reins while waiting for the film crew to call for action. The ground smelled like eucalyptus and what I dreamed bluebells would smell like.

We listened to the camels gnaw, chomp and nibble the long blades of thick grass beside us. Chewing close to my ear, a flaxen beast called Mustafa blew my hair with his rough breath. From the ground, the sky was a palette of blues, the suede softness of long camel noses and swaying pines.

a whiff of whimsy: tips from a traveling farmer

*Jakarta Globe, 16 Sept 2009

Traveling involves a confection – a whiff of the practical, a dash of the impractical and a stock of the possible. Becoming a traveling farmer is not a common journey to undergo but a feasible one, nonetheless. Though I embark on my journey armed with the alcoholic courage received from my wanderlust, others may do it differently. For those individuals dotty enough to trail my muddy footsteps, a few words of counsel:

1. Planning, albeit loosely, is a prerequisite. Find what you love and email them. Farms and eco-villages provided the best option for a girl seeking an alternative traveling experience. It is also low-cost. For a small fee, I can access the worldwide database of farms, homestays and rural individuals seeking a helping hand on sites such as http://www.helpx.net/ and http://wwoof.org/. In exchange for a few hours of my labour per week, I obtain knowledge of a new language, an abundance of permaculture, carpentry and cooking skills, with free food and lodging to boot. A perfect bartering system.

2. Be flexible. I only realized that my suede boots the colour of Morocco’s desert sand with the peppermint lollipop striped laces weren’t going to cut it in the moisture-laden jungles of South America, when I walked into an army surplus store by accident. It was there in a shop filled with military paraphernalia for budget prices that my Cockney-accented self-professed hobo salesman with the protruding gut told me I should trade up for a pair of British combat boots. “The British army walks the most in the world,” he tells me, vouching for their utmost comfort and durability. Indeed, while ankle-deep in freezing mud hiking the fjords of western Norway yesterday, I did not regret my purchase. My feet were as warm and dry as wholemeal toast.

3. A frequent flyer since I was two, packing my life into a 40 litre backpack is as second nature as writing is for a scribe. When it comes to packing, I follow the saying – “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothes.” Layers, layers, layers. Toss in a few t-shirts, undies and bras. My essential pieces include a grey hoodie and a rakish striped scarf. Leave the lipstick, fancy apparel and heels at home. Hairy cows and woolly sheep won’t be impressed by the fashion show. Besides, heels sink in mud. And bring pajamas! This is one thing I never see on a checklist for traveling backpackers and has left me wondering what they wear to bed.

4. Drift and open yourself up for chance, the strangers you meet and the elements you come across to take you with them. It is only then you can grant an audience for an unemployed lawyer to read you the rich passages from Richard III in Perth or stumble across the most talked-about restaurant in Beijing while running away from torrential rain and your inability to comprehend the local transport system.

5. Remember it is the small adventures, the little leaps of faith, that count towards the journey’s end. The time to taste slices of brown cheese and mix it with raspberry jam in Haugesund or a shot of hot chocolate made piquant by a sprinkling of chili powder in Florence. To paraglide tandem down a cliff with a man who doesn’t share your language or be the only pale-faced creature walking down the rural pathways of the heart of Africa.

6. Oddly enough, when we travel out into the unknown, telling ourselves we are adventurous and courageous for doing so, we are simultaneously reaching out for creature comforts to bind us to a place. Upon landing at Heathrow after years away from London, I grabbed a cheese Ploughman’s sandwich and sunk my teeth into the rough bread dripping with cheddar cheese and cubed brown pickles. The sandwich immediately re-established a connection to my days in the Big Ben. It was a memory-filled bite. A bite that brought back summer days sitting on lazy chairs in Green Park. That’s fine. But every once in a while, I stretch myself. I turn away from the cheese Ploughman’s that is calling out my name and head for another concoction, maybe one with hummus and alfalfa sprouts instead. Just to see if I can. To go outside the zone of cozy.

7. Finally, deviate. On your travels, it will naturally occur, anyway. Start small. One day, take your feet somewhere else. Take your shoes off and amble down the green commons of Mega Kuningan. Swing your legs and wrap them around the steel coolness of a bicycle and pedal around your neighbourhood. Instead of going straight home in the evening, drive with a friend and get lost in the many nameless streets that wind through the metropolis of Jakarta. Follow the lyrical note of a street busker. Break a habit. Be tardy. Let your eyes linger on something enchanting, just a little bit longer than usual.

Perhaps this may only make sense when you finally get on that plane headed into unknown territory. For when the clouds break and you see land, you become, each time, an explorer, a pioneer. When the clouds break is the time to brace yourself and leap.

a whiff of whimsy: saying goodbye to Jakarta for adventures unknown

*Jakarta Globe, 9 Sept 2009

One Sunday in August, I decided to be a traveling farmer. To throw caution to the wind and abandon the cerebral life of a journalist for earthly toil. Fleeing the city for the woods and fields, my daily routine of interviews, chasing stories and nights of musing and tapping away on a computer is being swapped for scooping up chicken poop in Ecuador, milking cows in California, turning pigs into pork in England and riding camels in Austria.

Yet, as I embark on my camel-riding, cow-milking and poop-scooping journey across three continents, I have the feeling that Jakarta will be tagging along with me.

My Jakarta is like a woman many men fear: chaotic, wild, superficial, flighty, rough, sensual, insincere, imbued with possibilities but ultimately desirable. She is as varied as her culinary street fare and saccharine delights. She is the many faces of Eve. Not the girl you’d take home to mom, but the one you’d regret not dancing the jitterbug with at the prom. She is both the honking and clanking of Jalan Sudirman and the pockets of calm and croaking crickets of old Menteng.

Living in the city is a practice in adoration.

It is about finding the reckless freedom within the chaos of her streets, sensing her from the lowest depths of Citarum River’s 300 kilometers of sludge, dirt and garbage to the refrigerated malls of entertainment that have pimpled the skyline in the south, and encountering the resilience, warmth and, at times, dreamy nature of her inhabitants.

She is that capricious child who brings to mind the delightful poetry of E.E. Cummings that swoops and dips and swings, breaking all the rules.

She is the very epitome of Walt Whitman’s “One Hour To Madness and Joy,” the very trembling of that poem if read aloud, in defiance to all those who condemn her.

One of the last memories I have of my hometown is the Indonesian capital in the throes of a Friday lunch hour. Riding an ojek , frantically heading for the Dutch Embassy to obtain my all-too troublesome Schengen visa, I shut my eyes. With the view of the rush-hour traffic gone, I was hit not only by a cacophony of sounds but a riot of smells. A blurt of a diesel engine sputtering smoke, a tantalizing lick of roadside snacks simmering in oil and the heavy warm air of noon, with farting buses, tweeting cars and the dangerously flirty growl of motorbikes. I couldn’t help myself. I took a deep breath. I inhaled Jakarta, with her menagerie of congested traffic, smoke, cloves, gorengan , leaves, asphalt and dust. And for those five seconds, as the pollution swamped my lungs and the city rang in my ears, I felt one with the glorious, multifaceted beast that is Jakarta.

At night, the metropolis is a lady. She smolders quietly. Bedecked with neon, tungsten and fluorescent lights from the streets and skyscrapers, she has that sexy after-sex glow.

I have always loved cities at night. They have a different aura, sense and vibe. During the witching hour, Jakarta is at the height of her beauty. Emptied of her usual inhabitants, her streets seem as wide as the desert highways in a Gus Van Sant movie. The air smelling as pure as a baby’s breath. At night, Jakarta feels most like home.

But for all the love I have for this city, I am still taking off on a jet plane. It wasn’t time to grow my roots just yet.

A few years ago, on the verge of his third decade, a friend took a leap toward safety and security. I, on the other hand, realizing I was settled and comfortable, chose to throw a life of sluggish ease, air-conditioned living and wonderful companionship to the wind.

Comfort to me is a dangerous quagmire, luring me in to schlep around in a chair of life, as snug as a blue-and-white fabric sofa from Ikea that I once had.

There are, after all, many ways to live. It can be by digging your heels deep into a career, building a family and a home, or buying that expensive pair of ripped Dolce & Gabbana jeans to stave off a quarter-life crisis. It can also entail working in eco-villages in South America, being a festival manager in New York City, shooting a documentary in Uganda, going to a book reading by Michael Ondaatje, swimming in the Seychelles or greeting the Inuit of Alaska with an Eskimo kiss.

With these myriad of choices in mind, I am allocating myself a year of whimsy.

A wise colleague once said he saw his old self in me — the one that meandered, like a river yet to find its mouth.

“One day,” he said, “you’ll find your mouth of the river.”

Sometimes I do long to be still. But for now, I’ll flow.